The Grinch Who Patented Christmas

theodp writes "The USPTO has reversed its earlier rejection and notified Amazon that the patent application for CEO Jeff Bezos' invention, Coordinating Delivery of a Gift, has been examined and is allowed for issuance as a patent. BTW, Amazon was represented before the USPTO by Perkins Coie, who also supplied Bezos with legal muscle in his personal fight against zoning laws that threatened to curb the size of his Medina mansion (reg.) before the City of Medina eventually gave up on regulating the size of homes (reg.)."

A paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

A method in a computer system for coordinating the delivery a gift given by a gift giver to a recipient when the gift giver did not provide sufficient delivery information.

But if the required information can be found from other sources (as the patent describes) then the gift giver has supplied sufficient information.

So the patent doesn't apply to any possible situation.

Isn't this obvious

[oo_waratah]

The concept of taking an order and then figuring out the address has been common in business practices for years. It is called get the cash then figure out how to meet the delivery. I ring them to get working on a major order, I then call back to confirm delivery instructions. I do this with hardware, or computer gear, or flowers. Flowers are typically a gift, so that would cover the prior art idea.

Most computer systems have the ability to modify the delivery address after the original input. Wouldn't this be prior art?

Patent raising children

[Weezul]

It would be cool for a group of developmental psychologists to get together, do a really brilliant job organizing what they already know about the best techniques for raising children and training day care personnel, and then set up a company to patent them all Once their research eventually made it to the front page of nature, people would want to use it, but discover that they could only do it if they made their day care into a franchise. It might help get people's attention, especially if the day care patents are far more legally sound then this garbage, plus it might make some developmental psychologists and their financial backers very rich.

Prior Art published Feb 1, 2002 (or 1995)??

[originalhack]

From here [smbiz.com].

Make sure you have a good address. If there's any doubt, call the customer or look up the address in an on-line or CD directory.

So, when will we stop issuing patents for using a computer to do EXACTLY the same thing that was previously done without it?

Now, if we'll let Jeff patent using a computer for exactly what was done without it, the 1995 publication of doing exaclty the same thing in the electronic world should act as prior art. From rfc1801 [ietf.org]

22.4 Bad Addresses If there is a bad address, it is desirable to do a directory search to find alternatives. This is a helpful user service and may be supported. This function is invoked after address checking has failed, and where this is no user supplied alternate recipient. This function would be an MTA-chosen alternative to administratively assigned alternate recipient.

VERY innovative Jeff

China Mieville's Christmas story

[Anonymous Coward]

Award-winning science fiction author China Mieville has written a wonderful Christmas story for the Socialist Review. It concerns itself not with the commercialization of Christmas, but with the privatization of it, with an era in which observing Christmas requires extensive license payments and agreements with the entities that hold the copyrights and trademarks in holiday traditions.

Don't get me wrong. I haven't got shares in YuleCo, and I can't afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn't have a legal party. I'd briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a non-specialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing. I wouldn't have been able to use much of the traditional stuff, and if you can't have all of it, why have any? (XmasTym had the rights to Egg Nog. But Egg Nog's disgusting.) Those other firms keep trying to create their own alternatives to proprietary classics like reindeer and snowmen, but they never take off. I'll never forget Annie's underwhelmed response to the JingleMas Holiday Gecko. [socialistreview.org.uk]

why pick on Amazon?

[CoughDropAddict]

I hate the patent crazyness as much as anyone. But why so many stories about Amazon's patents in particular? Amazon is a relative lightweight in the patent scene. IBM walks to the patent office with a stack of patents every single week. I'm sure you can find plenty to pick on in their applications.

Not to mention that Amazon is often on the receiving end of patent aggression. If you look at Amazon's most recent 10Q [10kwizard.com], you'll see that Amazon is currently the defendent in five patent infringement lawsuits.

Pinpoint, inc. is suing Amazon for patent infringement related to site personalization.

Soverain Software is suing Amazon for patent infringement of four of their patents, including a "Digital Sales System" and "Digital Active Advertising."

IPXL holdings is suing Amazon for infringement of a patent titled "Electronic Fund Transfer or Transaction System."

BTG International is suing Amazon for infringement of a patent titled "Attaching Navigational History Information to Universal Resource Locator Links on a World Wide Web Page."

Cendant Publishing is suing Amazon for infringement of a patent related to recommendations.

If you despise patent aggression, Amazon is not your poster child for patent abuse. Not even close. Amazon is taking a lot more than it's dishing out.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but of course do not speak for them.

Re:why pick on Amazon?

[cgenman]

A: Amazon arguably started the rediculousness with patenting 1-click shopping. It became a poster child for everything that was wrong with the patent system. From then, people realized that basically anything was patentable.

B: Amazon (or at least it's founders) were involved in a failed orginazation that offered rewards to root out bad patents.

C: Amazon continues to get rediculous patents.

In other words, Amazon has put itself squarely in the middle of the stupid patent debate, by A: being the first and B: publically and flagrantly playing both sides.

Maybe it doesn't look that way from the inside, but from the outside Amazon has become a rediculous symbol, and this patent isn't helping.

Patent application abuse prevention

[SlashCrunchPop]

What I would like to see is legislation that would prevent abusive companies like Amazon from launching such Denial of Service attacks on the USPTO, our economy and us as tax payers. Such abusive companies are filing thousands of ridiculous patent applications and counting on statistics to have a few of their riduculous patent applications slip through and get approved as well as to have initially rejected patent applications reversed. In the end those silly patents will get overturned and rejected, but it will cost us all a lot of time and tax payers' money.

There should be a law mandating that if a legal entity files more than a certain number of patent applications within a certain period of time (say, more than 5 within 30 days) and either more than a certain number of patent applications filed by that same legal entity within a longer period of time had been rejected (say, more than 5 rejected in the last 180 days) or the percentage of all the rejected patent applications ever filed by that legal entity exceeds a certain percentage (say, more than 25% rejected), then such a legal entity is only allowed to file no more than a certain number of patent applications per month (say, no more than 3 per month).

Re:why pick on Amazon?

[King_TJ]

Absolutely. But to at least some of us, Amazon was also a little frustrating from another standpoint.

When the .com "boom" was underway, Amazon just followed the same boneheaded business model that most of the others were taking; grow as big as possible, as fast as possible!

I remember reading more than one interview with Bezos back then that made it pretty clear the guy really didn't have much of a "common sense" business plan at all. He was often asked exactly what types of products or services he planned to concentrate on offering, and always gave back silly answers like "everything!".

For a while there, I remember them trying to compete directly with eBay, via "Amazon Auctions" - and it seemed like it was starting to gain some traction. I thought "Ah! Finally, Amazon has something really worth pursuing here!" I used their auction site and got great results. Very competitive, results-wise, with what I got from eBay but a little cheaper to use. But then they went off on some other tangent (as I recall, a big hoopla about partnering up with Toys 'r Us and becoming the largest online toy retailer?), and the auction site went into decline as eBay ate their lunch.

Then, that didn't pan out as expected either. All along, they were doing respectable book sales - but people kept questioning how Amazon would really attain/keep profitability as "merely on online bookseller", since books take lots of physical space to warehouse, go out of date rapidly in some cases, don't always have much markup, can get costly to ship, and it's a space with lots of competition.

I've always had a strong feeling that Amazon survived much more by luck than by expert guidance by Bezos or anything of that sort. His "let's get our hands in the middle of everything, and do it all!" attitude should have been the death of the business. That's NOT a smart idea - and shouldn't get your face on the front of magazines as "C.E.O. of the year"! But lots of others went bust faster than he did, so he got lots of inertia just by being "last man standing" in some areas. And perhaps all those non-profitable book sales finally earned him a lot of "brand recognition" that helped too. So now, he's managed to sell a "critical mass" of things that *are* profitable to sell in quantity, so it haphazzardly fell together. But bleah.... I can't say that makes me "respect" their business model.

What about Canada?

[AutopsyReport]

Anyone know if patenting problems like this exist in Canada? The last time I looked into patents in Canada, you could not patent any algorithm, formula, method, etc., related to computer software. It really didn't matter if you had a genius solution to something, it would rejected because it was built around software.

I look at this patent and it is so absurdly unoriginal that it should warrant rejection. Given that this patent was accepted, it amazes me that the concept of a Forum/Messageboard hasn't been patented already. And that's just one idea.

List of alternatives?

[springMute]

Maybe I'm too out of the loop, but does anyone have a list of big, generic, all-purpose online bookstores with good quality? With a global reach of course, since I'm not in the USA.

Address Lookup?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK its quite common to provide only house number and postcode. The address is then 'looked up' via a geocode against an additional database. In some instances the user only has to provide a partial postcode.

This has been done for years.

There is nothing original in this patent at all!

Amazon survives because of its infrastructure

[ZosX]

Not many people can compete with amazon on the scale that it does business. I believe that its secret is its supply and distribution chain. The can offer things for a lot cheaper than retail (compare best buy online with amazon one day) as well as have it out the door immediately. For instance, I ordered a digital camera for $180 that was retailing for $300. The order was shipped from Kentucky (guess they have more than one distribution center) and arrived at my house 2 days later. Shipping with two shippers involved was only $20. Amazon had it at their wharehouse docks on Sunday, before Fedex and UPS could pick up the order.

So, to summarize, Amazon is pretty cheap and gets their stuff shipped fast. Why wouldn't I keep buying from them? I agree that they didn't have much of a business plan when they started, but the factory production line styled assembly of people's orders was fairly innovative at the time and allowed the company to scale fairly well. Remember that a lot of dotcoms just didn't scale well and were never designed to get the kind of traffic in orders and sales that they ended up getting. It should be no suprise that they all failed where amazon succeeded because Bezos saw the growth possibilities and planned accordingly.

For what it's worth, amazon should have gone out of business a long time ago, but thanks to some questionable investing, they had enough liquidity to stay afloat in the red for the what, 2 or 3 years that it took for them to hone their business model into something that actually works and is profitable. Many dotcoms just didn't have the budgeting expertise necessary to keep themselves afloat to make their ideas work. They all blew their wad early and the Vulture Captitalists all started circling.

So, I wouldn't go and say that amazon did the same thing that all the other startups did and, even if I am wrong and they did, they were successful eventually which is something that none of those failed startups can ever claim.

Call to action

[pieterh]

I've also been walking the floors of the EP the last few weeks and have had the pleasure of speaking at various conferences where the likes of Francisco Mignorance (who both drafted part of the proposed legislation and now lobbies for it on behalf of the BSA), and Simon Gentry (who's C4C pretends to be on behalf of "creative people" but is actually a pure PR play) also took part.

The pro-patent lobby in Europe is very well funded, organised, and appears to control much of the legislative process itself.

For example, at the last SME roundtable discussion there were three representatives of real technology SMEs, a handful of MEP's assistants, and over 12 lobbyists, claiming to be small firms, but after the meeting, leaving together with Gentry. One of those occasions when I wish I'd had a camera phone.

I've uploaded a short statement [imatix.net] that is aimed at MEPs and their assistants. We'll be distributing this to assistants. Anyone who wants to help (early Monday morning, Brussels) please drop me a line.

We've also made a satirical site [pf-pf.org] that attacks the big business interests behind the push for software patents.

Finally, there is a demo in Strasbourg on Tuesday morning, and the FFII is organising busses from most of Europe.

If you can spare the time, put on a suit and tie and get yourself to Strasbourg for 8.00am on Tuesday.

A large and visible demo will help focus MEP's minds. They will probably vote on Wednesday and unless a near-miracle happens, by the end of the week we will be facing the US situation in Europe.

Here, let me put a clearer reasoning

[NigelJohnstone]

Let me put to you a reasoning why when the courts determine high burdens of proof in patent challenges that they are actually strengthening the patent officers right to make a judgement call.

1) The patent law includes subjective elements and objective elements.
2) The patent officer decides on those subjective elements.
3) He decides to issue the patent based on his judgement.
4) Someone challenges the patent.
5) The courts decides that to overrule the patent officers judgement you need that high level of proof of X Y Z.

It's not that the court decided that patent officer needed that high level of proof X Y Z to refuse to issue the patent. It's that the courts have backed his judgement by default unless a high burden of proof is provided to overturn it!

The stricter the conditions X Y Z, the more the court is strengthening the right of the patent officer to make that initial judgement!

Again, if you disagree, can you bring me a case law example where the courts IN THE CONTEXT THE PATENT EXAMINER FACES have ruled that to refuse the patent that same high burden of proof of prior art and non obviousness.
Either a court challenge to a refused patent, or where the Judge specifically references an incorrect judgement call on behalf of the patent officer would do it.

But I have to put it to you that its just the US patent office refusing to do its job.
That 'invention' is clearly already *known* and *used* so he should not have been given the patent.

Earlier Application

[Anonymous Coward]

A company I used to work with applied for this same patent on 4/19/99. The amazon patent was filed on 7/12/02.

See http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=frogmagic &OS=frogmagic&RS=frogmagic [uspto.gov]

Do I have to throw out my phone books now?

[Brett Johnson]

So Jeff Bezos just patented calling the recipient to ask his mailing address or looking it up in the phone book.

I can see the phishing scams now.

"LandShark.com wishes to arrange delivery of a candygram gift to you. Please provide full delivery address and a time when someone will be available to answer the door..."

Obscure SNL "Land Shark" reference explained here:
What is a LandShark? [math.ubc.ca]
Trick-or-Treating LandShark [jt.org]
Jaws II [jt.org]
Jaws III [jt.org]

Re:Gamer

[westlake]

The sheer size of Bezos's net worth isn't relevant to the question, which was concerned with its origin.

Success in retail depends on identifying potential customers, serving them well, building brand loyalty and encouraging future sales, while keeping your costs under control.

Amazon does this better than almost anyone. Study: Online Shoppers Consider More Than Price [mediapost.com]

The legal system will be of little help to you, if you haven't mastered the fundamentals.

And is preventing others from doing likewise also considered a good thing?

You could, of course, purchase a license from Amazon or find a better solution on your own.